Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and can provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices can include several types of devices including mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless PDAs, and laptop computers with wireless 802.11 or Bluetooth capabilities. These devices run on a wide variety of networks from data-only networks such as Mobitex and DataTAC to complex voice and data networks such as GSM/GPRS, CDMA, EDGE, UMTS and CDMA2000 networks.
Portable electronic devices such as PDAs or smart telephones are generally intended for handheld use and ease of portability. Smaller devices are generally desirable for portability. A touch screen display for input and output is particularly useful on such handheld devices as such handheld devices are small and are therefore limited in space available for user input and output devices. A touch screen display may comprise a virtual keyboard, and the user may interact with the virtual keyboard by touching regions on the touch screen display that correspond with individual displayed keys. However, the precise location where the user intended to touch may be difficult to accurately detect. This may be exacerbated when the user interacts with the touch screen display using an object with a large surface area, such as a finger.
Improvements in touch screen devices are therefore desirable.